The Best Victim by Thompson Colleen

Author:Thompson, Colleen [Thompson, Colleen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Published: 2013-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

EPISODE TWO

I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

—Marquis de Sade

CHAPTER FOUR

The mention of his wife’s name reopened old scar tissue, and Brent was there again, seeing the streamers of pale golden hair floating on the surface, hearing the splash of blood-tinged waves as he’d dragged Carrie from her bath.

But the water had long since grown cool, just as she had, her flesh pale and wrinkled from the water, her hazel eyes wide and fully dilated. Worst of all had been the absence in them, the yawning emptiness that told him his frantic efforts at resuscitation had come far too late.

Yet he couldn’t make himself stop, not even when the paramedics—responding to a call he would never remember making—had tried to pull him away. Maybe it was because he knew, knew it to his marrow, that this cold kiss would be their last, this damp embrace final.

“Your wife,” Lauren was saying, her words ringing in his ears like the distant tolling of church bells. “Of course. It all makes sense now. How long ago?”

Caught in a memory of the funeral, he didn’t answer until she repeated the two words, “How long?”

The death knell in his head fell silent long enough for her question to sink in. A question, as simple as it was impatient, without a trace of the pitying condolences he was so damned sick of hearing.

“Two years,” he answered. “Two years ago today.”

“The other killings,” she continued, sounding as detached and clinical as a federal agent investigating strangers’ deaths. “Did at least one of them happen on the first anniversary?”

Recognizing the coping mechanism for what it was, he shook his head and clamped down on his own emotions, too. “No. And there’s no correlation among any of the other dates, except that the suicides I’m tracking have all been in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. One possible outlier in Albuquerque, but that’s the farthest I’ve found.”

“So you’re thinking that this troll—this killer’s—located in Texas and choosing victims within driving range?”

He would almost swear he heard her plotting points and drawing lines between them on a mental map, the way one of the bureau’s data geeks would. If he hadn’t seen the other Lauren, the one who’d pleaded for him to tell her the news of Rachel’s death was a mistake, the one who doted on a throwaway dog, he might have believed she was some sort of robot.

“It’s a pretty broad range, considering the size of Texas, but yeah,” he said, gratified by how quickly she had grasped an argument that no one in the bureau had been willing to consider. Or maybe they had looked into his theory, just as Special Agent in Charge Fremont Daniels had sworn, leaving Brent out of the loop because of his relationship with an alleged victim. In the end, though, they’d refused to see it, figuring the connections he saw so clearly as figments of a guilt-stricken mind.

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